Thursday, February 20, 2014

COMC/JustCommons/Sportlots 2013 roundup part 9: catching up with catchers

I've been sitting on a bunch of purchases from late 2013 that needed to be recorded, scanned, and posted, and I'm finally getting around to those. In many cases I may just mash up purchases by player instead of online store to make things easier. We'll see just how many posts I get out of this series, which I'm going to abbreviate COMC-JC-SL 2013.

Besides one more football post, I still have a decent number of baseball PC pickups to cover, so I mulled a few options like going with just one player, then looked at who was left and realized I had a trio of catchers I could show off. SPOILER FOR PLAY AT THE PLATE: sorry, no play at the plate cards. But that shouldn't take away from these three Michigan Men who scoff at the label of players at the position wearing the "tools of ignorance."

Bill Freehan 2005 Topps Retired Signature

This excellent modern card with a vintage photo, done in the style of 2005 flagship, puts me 80% of the way to a rainbow of Bill's Retired Signature cards--I own the Gold parallel, autograph and Refractor auto as well. An unsigned Black parallel (#d /54) is all that stands between me and another cool rainbow.

Bill Freehan 2013 Panini Golden Age Mini Carolina Brights Purple Back

And with that the "Arrgh minis" tag is back, although there's just this one today. And to be fair to 2013 Golden Age, five isn't a ridiculous number of minis to chase, especially when none are numbered. In fact, I now have three of those, including Blue and Green backs. With three different "brands" to chase, there's also a decent amount of variety here.

Bill Freehan 2013 Panini Golden Age Museum Age Memorabilia jersey

And speaking of Golden Age, here's a card I was after for a long, long time. It's not a bad relic card by any means, if a bit plain, but I couldn't believe sellers were asking more than a few bucks for a logo-less single-colored jersey swatch; hell, they still are! I landed my copy for a hair under $2.50 back in October. It's my 24th hit of the backstop, and he remains one of just three players in the baseball PC to have hit the 20-card mark (Rich Hill and Zach Putnam are the others).

Freehan's new total is 67/132, putting him back over the 50% mark for the first time since I added his vintage O-Pee-Chee issues.

Mike Matheny 1994 Sportflics Rookie-Traded RC

Moving on to a more modern catcher, this is my third RC of current Cardinals skipper Mike Matheny. I bought it to go along with the Score Select and Ultra cards from the same year. I can't say why, but the '94 Sportflics set ended up looking pretty cool, and it's fun to see a young Matheny with the Brew Crew.

Mike Matheny 1996 Donruss Press Proofs

Next up is a solid Press Proof parallel from '96 Donruss. I'm young enough to have collected in the 90s when Press Proofs and their ilk were the "It" inserts, and even 18 years later, they're still fun to collect. In this case, I like that not only do you get a gold "PRESS PROOF" stamp, but the Donruss logo/team info box is also switched from silver foil to gold as well.

Mike Matheny 2004 Donruss Stat Line Season (#137/141)

Ok, now we've finally gotten around to one of my favorite recent pickups. Donruss came up with the Stat Line parallel in 2001, and players appeared one up to two versions: career and season. The cards are all numbered to a statistic from the player's career or season, and in this case, 141 represents the number of games in which Matheny appeared in 2003, which is pretty good for a catcher. He also happened to have a 1.000% fielding percentage that year, but 141 is a much lower number so it makes more sense for this set. The design is great thanks to a good starting point with the base set, then the beautiful rainbow foil making for the complete package.

Mike Matheny 2005 Topps Chrome Update Red X-Fractor (#40/65)

Speaking of spiffy red parallels, I landed another in the form of this '05 Chrome Red X-Fractor. I now have six different versions from Mike's rainbow from flagship and Chrome, including three Refractors, and I'd say this is the best out of all of them.

Mike's new total thanks to this four-card COMC pickup is 44, and I hope to cross that next milestone before much longer!

David Parrish 2001 Finest RC (#791/999)

Finally, I came up with a rare new addition to my Parrish collection. Though he was a first-rounder, David never made the Majors, and that meant he didn't appear on a ton of cards (which is probably how it should be, really). Most of the cards I'm missing are of the hard-to-find type, even this Finest RC. Though the numbering may seem to imply it's more common, I've seen very few available, and the prices (as with most of the others I still need) tend to be atrocious. This one wasn't bad, though, at a bit more than $2.50. Better yet, I even have a line on the Refractor from the same set!